Last November, executive coach and personal development advocate Patrice Gordon released a short, quick-hitting TED Talk titled How Reverse Mentorship Can Help Create Better Leaders.
In her Talk, Gordon flips the script of the traditional workplace mentorship, explaining that experienced leaders can learn a ton from their organization’s newest members. This, in turn, will enable said leaders to become even more productive.
While Gordon’s focus is internal, her advice can also be applied to your brand’s relationship with your customers. In looking to become truly customer-centric, it’s crucial for your team to focus on what your customers are telling you — rather than assuming you already know what they want from your brand.
Let’s take a look at how you can apply Gordon’s key points to the way you approach your customers moving forward.
1. Find Quality Mentors
Gordon’s first suggestion when forming a reverse mentorship is to connect with individuals “with a pulse on key spokespeople”.
For our purposes, this means that the mentors you choose to focus on should be those who best represent your audience as a whole.
In other words, you need to focus on generating feedback from your VIP customers.
Most obviously, this means engaging and learning from those who have provided the most value to your company. It’s simple: Those that spend the most on your products and services will have a lot to say about what your brand does well — and where it may need to make improvements.
Similarly, your long-time brand loyalists will be quite familiar with your brand — even if they don’t necessarily provide the highest monetary value to your business. These customers will have experienced your brand’s evolution over time and can help point your team in the right direction.
Yes, feedback from all of your customers can be valuable in its own right.
But, in looking for reverse mentors that will help your brand grow in impactful ways, you need to focus on those who:
- Are familiar with your brand
- Have consistently found success in your products and services
- Have high hopes and realistic ideas as to what more your brand can bring to the table
2. Standardize and Systematize Engagements
Gordon also explains the importance of setting ground rules for the reverse mentorship to ensure the mentee (i.e., the leader) comes away with the information they’re seeking in the first place.
The same goes when engaging with your customers to gather feedback and learn from them:
You need to ensure that they stay focused on specific areas of their experience with your brand. While you’ll eventually want to cover the entire spectrum, each feedback session should revolve around a single aspect of your CX.
Moreover, you need to set this focus from the get-go. Yes, you want the customer to take control of the conversation (more on this later), but if their focus is too broad, you’ll encounter any number of problems:
- A lack of depth in the feedback you receive
- Collecting feedback that’s irrelevant to your current purposes
- Collecting incomplete feedback that may be misleading
In setting the ground rules for each engagement, you’ll also be more prepared to take in and interpret the feedback you collect. If you’re not prepared, any unanticipated feedback you collect may end up doing more harm than good.
While your goal is to let your customers speak freely about their experiences with your brand, keeping them focused on one point at a time will maximize the value of the feedback you collect from them.
3. Empower the Customer to Make Their Voice Heard
Gordon’s advice here is pretty simple:
To get the most out of a reverse mentorship engagement, the mentee needs to feel comfortable saying what they need to say — period.
While Gordon’s advice — start with an ice-breaker — is more about a singular action, there are more overarching principles to follow when collecting feedback from your customers.
For one thing, you need to ensure they’re comfortable speaking about their goals, the challenges they’ve faced, and even the shortcomings they’ve encountered along their path to success.
Similarly, your customers should feel comfortable discussing areas of your branded experience that are in need of improvement.
The more open they can be in these regards, the more you’ll learn about how to better serve them in the future. If they aren’t entirely truthful with the feedback they provide, you simply won’t be able to make the changes they’re looking for.
More than just making your customers “feel comfortable” giving feedback, you also need to ensure they understand the true power their feedback brings to the table. If they don’t feel like you’ll actually do something with the feedback they provide, well…they probably aren’t going to invest much time in giving it to you in the first place.
4. Resist the Urge to Take the Reins
One thing Gordon warns about in her Talk is role-reversion.
That is, when listening to a mentee’s suggestions, it can be all too easy for leaders to revert to their traditional “top-down” role — which defeats the purpose of reverse mentorship completely.
This also applies when soliciting feedback from your customers: It’s vital to avoid leading the conversation in the direction that you assume it’s headed — and instead allow the customer to maintain control of the engagement.
On the surface, this means avoiding common survey mistakes, such as asking loaded or leading questions. The problem with such questions is they make assumptions about the customer’s stance from the start — which can cause them to respond in ways that may not be entirely accurate.
(If anything, you should always defer to the customer’s actual comments, and probe for more explanation or clarification based on what they’ve actually said. We’ll come back to this in a bit.)
Looking at the big picture, you again want to ensure that the customer feels comfortable steering the conversation as they see fit. To this end, you’ll want to provide ample opportunity for them to expand on their previous statements, questions, or concerns.
The flip side of this: Don’t shut the door on your customers just because they’ve given what you consider to be “enough” feedback. Chances are, they’ll always have more to say — but only if you let them say it.
The entire purpose of allowing for more customer-centric feedback is to uncover information that you may not have originally anticipated. That said, the only way to surface this information is to allow your customers to take the reins.
5. Clarify and Reflect
As Gordon explains, it’s essential for those involved in reverse mentorships to reflect on the information communicated within each engagement session.
Such reflection is just as important once you’ve collected feedback from your customers.
You’ll want to assess the information provided by the customer in terms of comprehensiveness and reliability.
- Did they provide a complete picture as to their experiences with your brand?
- Is their feedback clearly stated and able to be interpreted as they meant it to be?
- Are there any gaps or discrepancies in knowledge that need to be clarified?
This goes back to the importance of not making assumptions, and instead being doubly sure that your interpretation of the feedback aligns with the customer’s true thoughts and feelings.
Once you’ve clarified the feedback you’ve received, your team can then begin reflecting on what it all means for your company moving forward.
Think about whether your team has lived up to your intended goals in terms of how you’ve served your audience.
- Does the feedback you’ve collected reflect the effort you’ve put into improving your products, services, and overall CX?
- Does this feedback align with your “on paper” successes (i.e., your team’s ability to meet certain KPIs and business goals)?
- How does this feedback compare to the general outlook of your target audience, and your industry as a whole?
Most importantly, you’ll need to reflect on what needs to be done based on the feedback given. Needless to say, if you don’t have a plan for how to use this feedback to deliver a better experience to your customers, you might as well not collect it at all.
Now, this isn’t to say you should act on your customers’ words verbatim — which is why a period of reflection is so important here.
Rather, you’ll want to assess all that you’ve discussed in context to determine the best course of action for your team. Once you’ve collected the information you need, you can again assume the role of leader, and use what you’ve learned along with your expertise to make improvements to your services across the board.
6. Thank and Celebrate Participating Customers
To wrap up her Talk, Gordon emphasizes the importance of giving credit to participating mentees as a way to empower them and others who want to make their voices heard.
When soliciting feedback from your customers, it’s incredibly important to ensure they know full well how valuable their feedback is — both to your company and to them as patrons of your company.
On a basic level, you should be piling on the gratitude throughout your engagements whenever possible. Going beyond simply verbalizing this gratitude, you also want to show thanks by staying actively engaged with your customer as they voice their comments, questions, and concerns.
Going a bit deeper, you also want to reward those who put effort into helping you make improvements to your operations.
In some cases, extrinsic rewards can be appropriate — and can incentivize your customers to engage and provide feedback on an ongoing basis. However, you should tread lightly here: While there’s nothing wrong with providing a small yet valuable reward to your customers, you don’t want this reward to influence the actual feedback they provide.
(And these tangible rewards shouldn’t be the reason they give you feedback, either.)
That said, the better route to take is to provide intrinsic rewards to your customers — and your overall audience base.
You can do this simply by taking action — and letting your customers know what your plan is.
As you begin to make improvements based on your customers’ comments, be sure to communicate:
- What you’ll be doing to improve their experiences
- How these improvements will translate to additional value for them
- What this additional value will mean in terms of their ability to reach their goals (and more)
As we mentioned earlier, your customers aren’t going to take the time to give feedback if it clearly won’t benefit them.
Perhaps the most important part of collecting such feedback, then, is bringing your customers into the fold — not as outsiders looking in, but as invaluable members of your brand’s community.
As they learn firsthand that their feedback will ultimately benefit them, they’ll be more than happy to dole it out whenever they have something important to say.
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